A new Douglas Coupland book is not perhaps the tickertape event it should be. With 12 novels to his name and countless other projects on the go, this 46-year-old writer, and former physicist and sculptor, is almost preposterously prolific. If not exactly avant-garde as a writer, his subjects are reliably cutting edge.

He helped to define the grunge generation (with Generation X) he was quick to the scene when the dotcom bubble burst (with Microserfs back in 1995) and he has subsequently made it his business to speculate (mostly accurately) on how new technology might affect our lives. Technology, he claims, will like porn promise much but deliver little.

His new novel, The Gum Thief, has as its heroine a sad, somewhat overgrown Goth, Bethany. Bethany perpetually complains that though she is not yet dead she certainly wishes to be. Her wardrobe is certainly boneyard-ready.

Beth's friend and adversary is Roger, a decrepit divorcee and alcoholic with whom she becomes peculiarly intimate, through written messages exchanged at the sublimely dreary stationery superstore where they both work. Between all this there are excerpts from Roger's dreadful novel, and the strange ever-present phantom of the internet. In other words we have people who have too much to think about and too little to believe in. It is true Gen X-er stuff.

All of which is very angry, very sweet, very now, and very, very Doug. The most strikingly up-to-date aspect of this book, however, is in its promotion. Coupland, who hates book tours, has decided to reach out to his public this time via YouTube, neatly excusing himself from mobile marketing. So far there are 10 snippets of The Gum Thief hovering in cyberspace. Read by him in a suitably dreamy fashion they are accompanied by a series of brilliant short films that work like movie trailers. Individually, they remind me of Afterworld - the episodic drama about a man who wakes up in New York to discover everyone else in the world is dead.

Both share the same themes of alienation and loneliness and both the same terrible love and mistrust of technology. As an advert for his book these readings work beautifully, leaving me enjoyably confused and wishing for more.

Some people may argue that YouTube is an illiterate medium that serious writers should avoid. Isn't this the enemy? But these films make me at least want to read the novel in total, and the notion that novels may in someway be visualised in short and snappy chunks actually makes me rather happy.